Illustration | Eye Opening Design

A few years ago, I got interested in the freeware renderer, POV-Ray. This image was a test of various materials you could use to render shapes with.

Joan of Arc

An early attempt at 3D rendering. Most of the model work was from free online sources. The pose and attempt at traditional toon rendering was all me.

I did a bunch of pencil roughs of a whole series of people. A real cross-section of North Americans. They were all punted in favour of a mod/hipster type drawings similar to this guy here. (that were ultimately rejected in favour of just not doing the project at all). I always thought it was a shame the drawings never made it past a very early conceptual stage. So I set about to change that. This is the first one. I’ll maybe do a few more later on.

This one was my favourite of the bunch. My wife thinks he looks a lot like Billy Blanks of Tae Bo fame. I have to admit, there is a resemblance, but he was the furthest thing from my mind when I was originally sketching out the images.

The image started off as a scan of the pencil drawing and then I went to town dropping in colour. Starting out with flat tones of colour and then built up the highlights and shadows. Pretty straightforward. The only really crazy thing I did was essentially re-do all the linework directly in Photoshop. Lots of fun with the Paths tool and a custom Photoshop brush. Resulted in some nice a slick lines.

Car – Honda Insight

A vector illustration of our car, a Honda Insight.

Life Drawing 2001–2011

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So here’s a slideshow of a whole bunch on images from my mostly on again/off again affair with the WAG’s life drawing program. Mostly black and white stuff using conté crayon, but a few colour pieces as well. Most of the pieces range from 10 minutes to half an hour. Though there are a few quickie gesture drawings and some longer poses to round everything out.

This is only a small sample of the some 200 odd photos I took the other week. Had to purge since it was taking up just too much space at home. Had some pretty interesting recycling this past Tuesday.

And in case anyone ever wonders how a married man gets away with staring at naked women (mostly) once a week, keep in mind, my wife is a photographer (she knows the drill), and I’ve been told I HAVE to be outta the house once a week for girls facial night. Apparently, her and Jessie’s (our female cat) pores are in dire need of cleansing. So there you go.

Introducing: Image of the Month

I’m going to try and challenge myself to put together one personal illustration a month until I get sick of it. Has to be either digital or traditional media. This very first one, is a digital piece. Not too long ago, I had to do a series of lottery ticket designs based on fantasy/mythological creatures. They turned out okay, but there were so many time restrictions, odd marketing demands to follow, not to mention a few technical restrictions, that I felt I could do better. So I set about to re-create one of the images as if I were the boss (and didn’t have to worry so much about reproduction restrictions.) The result is below: